Communication systems, such as paging systems, typically communicate messages from an originating device to one or more destination devices. These messages can include numeric and alphanumeric information for a user of the destination device. The destination device, e.g., a selective call receiver or pager, typically presents the information received to the user by displaying the information on a display.
Contemporary paging systems offer a limited message length for communicating information. For example, an alphanumeric message may be typically 80 characters or less. These typical message lengths have provided reasonably reliable delivery of messages to the users of the communication system.
On the other hand, a distinct trend in the market is for customers desiring much longer messages, such as messages that are ten to one hundred times longer or more. Transmission of these messages over a paging channel can encounter a number of obstacles to reliable delivery of the longer messages, such as different types of interference, fading, noise, and other phenomena detracting from error-free and reliable communication of the messages to the destination devices.
This difficulty in reliable transmission of the longer messages is especially frustrating to customers that are used to communicating long messages over a more reliable communication medium, such as direct wire line or dial-up telephone communication. This is particularly the case for electronic mail system users which typically desire to send relatively long messages with a high degree of certainty that the messages are received error free. Typically, an originating device, such as a personal computer or workstation, can send long messages to one or more destination devices, such as other personal computers or workstations, over a direct wire line interface, or over a local area network (LAN), or over a dial-up telephone line connection using the public switched telephone network (PSTN).
Therefore, a need exists to enhance the reliability of transmitting messages, including long messages, in communication systems that utilize paging systems for delivering the messages.